A Nonlinear Planner for Solving Sequential Control Problems in Manufacturing Systems

. The design of the sequential control program for a manufacturing system is a difficult task which is traditionally carried out by engineers. In this paper we present MACHINE, a nonlinear planner with an automata-based representation of operators, which is able to obtain control sequences for manufacturing systems. These control sequences are an abstract representation of a sequential control program which may be easily translated into real programs expressed as GRACFET charts or Petri nets. 1 Introduction The design of sequential control programs for manufacturing systems is a difficult task which is traditionally carried out by engineers. Artificial intelligence planning techniques have proved to be very useful in the building process of such programs [5, 7, 9, 10, 14] obtaining error-free programs and saving engineering time, which makes it an area of increasing interest in the AI community. However, there are some features of manufacturing systems that are not considered or are n..